-----Original Message----- From: Jonathan McDowell [mailto:noodles@earth.li]

Heh. I'd noticed Amstrad had been looking at the list and wondered if we were ever going to hear anything from them. :)

Yup, when I looked at the "member" list I think I spotted something like 4 of my colleagues on there ;-)

That would be nice; with access to the NAND code it should hopefully be possible to use something like JFFS2 instead, giving a writable file system. Plus it would help with getting the kernel updated to 2.6 - I know Vince Sanders has been talking about trying to get better OMAP support in the mainline kernel.

We've been toying with the idea of taking Montavista's latest distribution which is a 2.6 - but at the moment we're working on the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it principle"! (and 2.4 works for everything in our specific application)

That's £100, isn't it? Or was it originally sold for more than that?

£100 is roughly what we were thinking. I couldn't guarantee that it would be exactly that might be a bit more (or possibly less even). The more I look at other Linux dev systems the more I think £100 (inc the 480x320 colour LCD) is really cheap. Others have pointed me in the direction of www.gumstix.com and http://www.kwikbyte.com/KB9202_description_new.htm#BuyNowKB9202 as examples of other "cheap" dev systems. But they have dramatically less resources on the board and obviously no sign of an LCD, let alone a colour one. I guess it's just a shame doesn't have an Ethernet MAC on board but we'd expect most people to do what we do and get a USB-Ethernet adapter (we use Netgear FA101/Belkin F5D5050 for example) and use this for NFS based development (which is exactly how we develop for it)

Do I think you'd sell these for £100? Certainly, especially if it was packaged nicely. I bought an E3 for the purposes of hacking on partly due to the fact that the idea of decent SIP/IAX phone appealed. You'd probably find others who felt the same way and who would buy something in the style of the E3 but without the Amstrad proprietary software but a development environment instead.

To be clear this (probably) wouldn't be in the style of an E3. We'd probably ditch a lot of the "telephone" gubbins. It'd basically be a box (maybe pressed steel or something) with an E3 board at the heart (maybe with modem section depopulated) and the LCD/backlight module fitted into the "roof" - a trailing cable would go to the PS/2 QWERTY as found on the E3. So it'd just look like a generic little computer in a box - nothing like a telephone. I think we probably would put a JTAG header on it for those interested in such things (though maybe this isn't such a necessity now that Linux is ported)

Personally, it's unlikely I'd buy a developer model at the start - not because I don't want one, just that it's hard to justify even more toys at present. :)

Fair enough. If you know others doing Linux development then feel free to mention this and see what they think. I'm just interested in as much feedback as possible right now to decide whether to launch off in this direction. While there (hopefully!) wouldn't be much work to be done on our part, there would be some and we need to gauge whether such effort would be economically justified.

Cliff

This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and intended exclusively for the addressee. If you are not the intended recipient please delete it from your system and notify the sender immediately. This message is attributed to the sender and may not necessarily reflect the views of Amstrad Plc or its subsidiaries.

For further information on Amstrad Plc please visit our website: www.amstrad.com

Amstrad Plc. Brentwood House 169 Kings Road Brentwood Essex CM14 4EF Registered in England : No. 955321